Academy Award-winning screenwriter Tom Schulman has been tapped to chair the 18th annual USC Scripter® Award selection committee. The ceremony will be held Saturday, February 11, 2006 on the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles.

Bestowed annually since 1989 by the Friends of the USC Libraries, the Scripter Award honors the year’s best film adaptation of a book or novella, and is given to both the author and screenwriter. The 2005 Scripter awards were presented to the late author F.X. Toole and screenwriter Paul Haggis for their contributions to the Oscar-winning film, Million Dollar Baby.

“I’m honored to chair this prestigious committee,” Schulman said. “The Scripter Award is unique in recognizing both the novelist and adapting screenwriter’s contributions to film, and it shines a light on this important process which brings so much enrichment and entertainment to us all.”

Schulman will lead a selection committee comprising Writers Guild of America members — including Academy Award-winning and -nominated screenwriters — fiction and nonfiction authors, film industry executives, USC faculty and selected members of the Friends of the USC Libraries. Each January, the selection committee chooses five finalists, and then a winner, from among all English-language films based on books or novellas released the prior year.

Schulman won an Oscar in 1989 for his original screenplay for the film Dead Poet’s Society. Among Schulman’s other writing credits are Medicine Man, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, What About Bob? and, most recently, the Ray Romano-Gene Hackman comedy Welcome to Mooseport. He also wrote and directed the comedy 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, and executive produced the hit films Me, Myself & Irene and Indecent Proposal. His current projects include the thriller, Worst Case, co-written with
Raphael Yglesias, to be produced by Working Title Films, and the drama Morgan’s Summit, which Schulman also will direct, to be produced by Laura Ziskin.

Schulman is a former president of the Writers Guild Foundation, and he continues to serve on its board. He is the co-chair of the Screen Council and the Committee for the Professional Status of Writers for Writers Guild of America, west.

The annual black-tie Scripter Award gala is held in the Los Angeles Times Reference Room of the Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library at USC. Proceeds benefit the Doheny Library Preservation Fund.

For additional information, please call (213) 740-2328, email scripter@usc.edu or visit http://scripter.usc.edu.